


Five Lines and a Speech

by bendingwind



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Spoiler Alert: Clint Is A Really Bad Flirt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint isn't so great at flirting, and Steve isn't used to being flirted with. Or: Five times Clint's flirting was mistaken for bullying and one time Steve recognized it for what it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Lines and a Speech

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowen/gifts).



**5.**

It starts off pretty normally, with Agent Barton cutting off the pretty agent who ate lunch with Steve the day before and sliding into the seat across from him in the SHIELD mess hall.

“Hey,” Barton says, and Steve offers him a small smile and takes a bite of his somewhat wilted salad.

**4.**

“So I never did thank you for, you know, putting in a good word for me after the thing in New York,” Barton says one day, kind of out of the blue. Steve peers out of the window of the quinjet, trying to see if Europe is visible on the horizon yet. “I really appreciated not having to sit through level three mind-control psych eval bullshit. Nice that someone’s word counts for something around here.”

“That was all Agent Romanov,” Steve says, absently, squinting at something that is either a land mass or a very large bird.

“Well, she says it was all you,” Barton says, and then he’s suddenly in Steve’s space a little, nudging his shoulder. “By the way, you know we’re teammates now? You can totally call us Clint and Natasha. ‘Agent Barton’ makes me itch.”

“You can call me Steve,” Steve says, and then he pauses. Definitely a very large bird. Great. “Off-mission.”

Barton-slash-Clint makes a noise somewhere between a snort and a chuckle, and then leans in even more, peering past Steve.

“That’s a giant bird with very large teeth flying towards us, isn’t it?” he asks.

Steve nods.

“Well fuck.”

**3.**

After a particularly intense workout, Steve collapses onto the bench in SHIELD’s main gym, ignoring a small group of very young onlookers and feeling pretty pleased with himself for having managed to stretch this punching bag for an entire week without breaking it. Maybe he’s finally settling in to this era.

“Hey there, soldier,” someone says, and Steve looks up to find that Clint has broken away from the crowd of observers and is now standing over him, hands shoved in his pockets and settling into a deliberately casual stance.

“Did you want to go a round?” Steve asks, curiously, because he’s sparred with Natasha and Thor and even once (disastrously) with Stark, but never with Clint.

“Naw, just wondering if you, uh, would be interested in grabbing drinks sometime?”

“I can’t get drunk,” Steve replies, bemused, as he unwraps his knuckles.

“Me and Nat are going to this bar tonight, we thought it might be good for you to get out, you know, see the world or whatever.” Clint shifts a little, awkwardly, as Steve shifts all of his attention to the sheepish agent.

“Did Fury assign you to do this?” he demands, because he will be damned if befriending him becomes a mission to be passed from one agent to another until he finally accepts someone’s overtures.

Clint’s hands slide out of his pockets and up into a position of surrender.

“Woah, no way, and I’m pretty bad at following his orders anyway. It’s just drinks.”

Steve stares at him for a moment longer, trying to figure out if he’s being genuine or not. He thinks Clint probably is, but--

“Maybe some other time,” Steve says, and he returns to unwrapping his hands.

**2.**

It’s not that Steve doesn’t appreciate the new uniform, it’s just that he’s not sure they got his measurements right. The suit’s gone from being snug to being uncomfortably tight.

“Nice,” Clint says, looking smug, when Steve walks into the conference room. He’s sprawled in one of the chairs, his feet propped up on the table, and Steve frowns a little at his poor manners.

“I think you got the specifications wrong on my suit,” Steve says, opting to ignore Clint’s teasing and focus instead on Stark “The suit’s a little tight.”

Stark throws his hands up, looking suspiciously innocent for a grown man.

“Hey, Cap, wasn’t my idea. Someone must’ve given me the wrong measurements.”

The look that Stark shoots at Clint is pretty blatant, and Steve turns his frown back to the apparent culprit.

“Look, if you want to make fun of me, could you do it out of uniform?” Steve says, and then pauses and decides to reword that, “It’s important to let off steam, but I need you to do it in a way that doesn’t affect my performance in action. Understood?”

Looking remarkably sheepish, Clint nods.

Natasha elbows him in the side, hard.

“Uh, yeah,” Clint says, and he looks down and fiddles with his bow.

**1.**

It’s an emergency and he doesn’t have a choice. At least, that’s what he tells himself to fight down the blush as agents poke their heads out of their office doors when he walks past, apparently to admire the view. He will _never_ get used to his body attracting this kind of attention.

He didn’t have time to find clothes before reporting to the conference room, and the towel covers everything important.

He pushes the door open to the conference room. Only Clint has arrived, wearing boxers and a t-shirt and with hair thoroughly ruffled from sleep. He blinks up at Steve through bleary eyes, gives him a lazy once-over, and then smiles.

“My, my, captain, if I’d known you were coming...” Clint says, and he runs a hand through his spiky hair and winks. Steve rolls his eyes.

“I was under the impression that this couldn’t wait,” he says, a little stiffly. “I figured there wasn’t much use finding and putting on clothes when I was probably just going to change into my uniform immediately after the debriefing.”

He’s spared Clint’s reply by the arrival of Stark, dressed in absurd silk pajamas and with hair too neat for him to have been in bed. Stark gives him a once-over as well, wolf whistles loudly, and then shoots a look at Clint and throws his hands up in the air.

“Woah there, cowboy, I get the point,” Stark says, still looking at Clint, and he sits down as far from Steve has he can get. Steve is spared the confusion of trying to figure out what just happened by the arrival of the rest of the team, being shuffled into the seat next to Clint, and a situation involving a sea monster that is evidently doing its level best to eat the east coast.

**0.**

Volunteering is one of Steve’s favorite parts of being an Avenger, even if it means hours in the itchy civilian version of his uniform and ends in explosions a good quarter of the time. He’s only here in a supervisory role this time, to ensure that Natasha doesn’t teach her charges how to make a garotte with a string of paper clips or that Clint doesn’t try to set up an archery range in the classroom. Stark has, thankfully, been banned from the event, and Thor is in Asgard tending to his affairs.

Dr. Banner will (probably) be fine.

He’s a little surprised, honestly, when he stops by the classroom Clint is speaking in and finds the room full of attentive students, all looking up at where Clint is sprawled across a spare desk at the front of the classroom with interest.

“So, sometimes you gotta push for what you want, and sometimes you aren’t gonna know _what_ you want. We aren’t all Captain America. He had a calling, you know, and he fought for it, fought to become what he is. Then there’re some of you who are gonna be like me, and fall into something that suits you because you don’t have any sort of special destiny or whatever. We aren’t all Captain America, but that doesn’t stop us from making a difference, okay? You’re important, no matter who you are or where you end up. Just do your best, and you’ll find your place. ‘Course, that’s just my two cents, and what does an old man like me know?” Clint makes a face, and most of the students chuckle. They have that look about them, the one that Steve sometimes used to see on young soldiers when someone told them the facts of life, and they realized that they weren’t the only soldier who was afraid and sad and lonely.

“Why can’t we all be like Captain America?” one of the students asks, without raising her hand.

“Well, the world would be an awfully driven place, wouldn’t it?” Clint responds, and a small, soft grin creeps up his face. “I guess I don’t really have an answer for you, but like I said, not being another Captain America doesn’t make you any less important. The Captain Americas of this world need people like me, people who know how to stop and relax and appreciate the things we have sometimes instead of constantly, relentlessly fighting for things to get better. You gotta see the good _and_ the bad, and maybe we’re just a bit better at seeing the good than anyone with a calling could ever be. So maybe we’re here so that the Captain Americas of the world can be better.”

“So we’re just the sidekicks?” another kid asks.

“Hey, don’t diss the sidekicks,” Clint says easily. “We’re pretty awesome too, even if the Captain Americas don’t always notice just how much we try and make life easier for them.”

And Steve is suddenly, brutally faced with the past few months, with Clint sitting high on a building where he was left out of nearly every scrap of public glory just so that he could keep Steve up to date on the situation and feed him advice that had made his orders a thousand times better. He’s struck by all the attempts Clint made to drag him into this new world, to help him make friends again and build a life in the stead of one he could never replace. He’s struck by just how bullheaded and uncooperative he’s been, realizes that Clint wasn’t making fun of him, all those times he had brushed Clint off; he was trying to help.

“And anyways,” Clint says from his perch on the desk, with the smug, joking lilt to his voice with which Steve is very familiar, “I’m not about to complain about seeing that uniform up close and personal.”

A few students titter, but Steve is too blindsided by this second revelation to notice. Clint had been _flirting_ with him, all along. Not just not mocking, but openly admiring. His guilt at dismissing Clint doubles, and he realizes he’s going to have to do better, be better, to bring this team together. Quietly, he slips away, trusting Clint to manage the kids alright on his own.

Later, in the parking lot, Clint sidles up to him and bumps his shoulder against Steve’s.

“You’ve got a lot of kids that really admire you, y’know,” Clint says, and Steve hears what he doesn’t say. For the first time, he offers Clint a genuine smile instead of a slightly confused frown. The way Clint’s face lights up absolutely makes it worth it.


End file.
